A Brief History of the CGU

John Tuzo Wilson, 1992.

On October 24, 1945, the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) convened the first meeting of an Associate Committee to advise it on the needs of geophysics, with J. Tuzo Wilson as the Committee Chair. In 1946, this committee was amalgamated with the Canadian Committee for the IUGG to form the Associate Committee of Geodesy and Geophysics (ACGG) of the NRC, with activities of Canadian geophysicists coordinated by a number of ACGG subcommittees. In 1974, the ACGG was replaced by a professional society called “The Canadian Geophysical Union, a joined Division of the Geological Association of Canada (GAC) and the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP)”; J.T. Wilson was its first president. The Canadian Geophysical Union became an independent organization in 1988, but geophysicists can still join us through CAP or the Geophysics Division of GAC.